Saturday, April 26, 2008

In-Progress At Kansas: Craftsman Trucks On SPEED

The big NASCAR triple-header continues on Saturday as the Craftsman Trucks run at the Kansas Speedway. SPEED comes on-the-air at 5:30PM with live coverage.

This weekend Krista Voda is in Talladega, so veteran announcer Rick Allen will step-in and pull double-duty. He will host the pre-race show, called The Set-Up, that has been a cornerstone of this solid coverage.

Down on pit road will be the very effective team of Adam Alexander and Ray Dunlap. These two have combined with outstanding focus and energy to bring viewers a solid overview of this series all season long.

Allen will be joined by Phil Parsons to call the race. Parsons has become the "face" of the Truck Series and is perhaps the most under-rated NASCAR TV analyst ever. His low-key approach and endless knowledge about the series works well with the excitement of Allen.

SPEED's Truck Series coverage has been noted for good overall production, including good decision-making on the final lap. This is the SPEED production crew, and perhaps the NASCAR on Fox folks may want to take note of this telecast.

This post will host your comments about the Truck Series on SPEED from Kansas. To add your comments, just click on the COMMENTS button below and follow the directions. The rules for posting are on the right side of the main page. Thanks for stopping by.

26 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Michael Waltrip is also calling this race. Long trip back and forth from Kansas to Talledega.

Why does NASCAR allow the Setup show for its Craftsman Truck Series to air at the same time as their Nationwide series is still airing? If pre-race shows are important, surely they have to know that most people are going to watch the end of a race (at Talledega!) than the Setup. And the race ran late, so even less people were watching. They should have delayed the Truck Series Setup show 30 minutes when planning these broadcasts earlier in the year.

anon, they did not know the talledega race would run late. No way to predict that, and once its planned there is nothing you can do just minutes before the scheduled start time. Besides the fans there want to see a race at the scheduled time.

There's only so much daylight to work with at Kansas....that's why you can't delay the start of the race anymore than possible. It's going to be a struggle to get this race in before dark as it is. Last thing it needs is to be delayed 30 minutes.

anon, they did not know the talledega race would run late. ------------My point is the pre-race show was scheduled for and began at 5:30, 30 minutes before the NW race was to end. That was in the predetermined schedule.

So not only did the pre-race show for the Trucks overlap the Talladega race (and who was watching? Probably not many people) - the actual race "bled" into the Trucks race time of 6 p.m.

So I'm saying NASCAR must not think the Setup show is that important. I didn't realize there are no lights at Kansas, but it's still NASCAR's responsibility that they scheduled two of their events knowing the official pre-race for one and the race for another conflicted.

Anonymous said... "knowing the official pre-race for one and the race for another conflicted."

They did NOT know it would conflict.

April 26, 2008 6:37 PM---------Y'all who are still saying Setup and the NW race didn't conflict, please learn to read and comprehend the previous posts. The Setup PRE RACE show was scheduled to air at the same time as the Nationwide Race. And it did.

Nationwide Race: Scheduled for 3-6 PM (Pre race at 2:30)

Setup: Scheduled from 5:30 to 6 PM (see the blog entry for proof).

See the conflict? See the overlap of the official pre-race for Trucks with the NW race? See the pre-determined conflict created by NASCAR? If you can't see it, well I don't know what else to say to you.

Michelle Theriault and Jennifer Jo Cobb were gone from this race long ago, just as I knew they would be. Too bad they didn't get Craftsman debuts in something other than Derrike Cope equipment. They were two of the three trucks which didn't even participate in first practice, and they came in last and second to last in final practice. Qualified 34th and 36th -last.

The big difference between this race and the NW race is emotion in the booth. I am multitasking (as usual) and knew I needed to stop and focus on the TV because something was going on. I would have missed the mess for the NW race with the lack of excitement from Doc, thankfully I was keeping the multitasking to a minimum then.

I don't see where a conflict with a pre-race show is that big of a deal. Watch the NFL playoffs. The NFC game on Fox most likely doesn't get over until after CBS' pre-game show for their AFC game has started. There's already a built-in conflict for those. This is no different.

Update: Dario Franchitti's ankle may be fractured, they are waiting for x-rays to confirm.

Ganassi has asked David Stremme, who he kicked out of that ride last year, to race Sunday. Stremme says it's up to Rusty Wallace and Roger Penske since he works for both of those teams now (For Rusty in Nationwide, where he did a great job today, and he's Penske's new test driver).

@anon 6:12--guess they figure people have DVRs/TiVos that are dual tuners and can record one while watching the other (or record both even). Then they can watch whatever they missed later on. But regardless I can understand the frustration over the timing.

thanks for the Dario update...i was worried he had a broken foot or ankle with that side impact. :( I really like him and hate to see him miss tomorrow's race but know he must take care of himself and heal.

Poor Dario he comes to Nascar after crasing big in open wheel and then gets hurt. He just can't catch a break. Hope the ankle isn't too bad or he could be out for a while. There are a awful lot of crashes in this race just from trucks loosing it. Speed is doing a good job trying to keep up and replaying them although at one point they were replaying one and there goes another. Oh my

Great broadcast by the Truck crew. Rick, Phil, and Michael are a very enjoyable combination in the booth and I didn't notice any glaring issues with the production.

Another A+ for the last lap camera work. Nice wide shot of the leaders and then the same camera that brought the leaders to the line froze its position and showed the rest of the field cross the line, with a vertical scoring tracker as they tripped the line.

Definitely a million times better than the Fox camera work that zooms in as close on the leader as possible and focuses on the winner and the winner only while others are racing to the line. One camera shot the entire time works much better. Even when Fox does cut to the finish line camera for a second or two we miss the next several cars behind the winner while the switch is made away from the zoomed camera shot of the winner.

I'm still amazed that the production trucks that work the ARCA, Truck, and Nationwide races "get it", while the one particular Cup production truck stil makes the curious decision that only the winner matters and everyone else is just a loser.

The only bummer about this broadcast was that Speed felt it necessary to spoil the outcome in hyping the tape-delayed ARCA race that was airing immediately following the live Truck race. I certainly wasn't a fan of the approach of saying "Tune in and see how ______ won the ARCA race yesterday." [I left the name blank for the benefit of those of you that didn't hear the 'spoiler']

It would have been one thing if they were on competing networks and it wouldn't be the job of the other network to hide the outcome of the tape-delayed event on the rival network, but when both races are on Speed and this is the first airing of the ARCA race, I certainly would have appreciated an approach such as "turn away if you don't want to know what happened in the ARCA race because we're about to talk about what happened".

Post race for Nationwide wasn't supposed to start at 5:30. Where did you get that from? Where is it listed that NW races have a 30-minute scheduled postrace built into the race time ending at 6? It's true they usually try to reserve 10 minutes or so of the race scheduled time for post race, but many times the race runs the entire scheduled time and post-race is after the scheduled race time is supposed to end.